Another comet unexpectedly brightens up - C/2012 X1 (LINEAR)

We have another bright comet in 2013, ladies and gentlemen!

C/2012 X1 (LINEAR) has unexpectedly brightened up, 4 months before its perihelion (the closest approach to the Sun), reaching the app mag of 8.5, possibly 8.2 which makes it visible in good binoculars.


Hopefully, the comet will continue brightening, making it one of the of relatively bright comets in 2013, along with ISON and Lovejoy. This comet should remain relatively bright throughout the first half of 2014 also! www.aerith.net...

Around mid-Dec, it will be near ISON, making for a great photo opportunity:
(comet Linear indicated by the red cross, I drew tail for ISON for easy identification)

Do you know when this will be visible from land? in australia

Isn't it neat . I just finished watching
The Electric Comet | Full Documentary www.youtube.com...

I know that the common theory of comets is that they are dirty snow balls but how could that be ?. They don't have the atmosphere or the geothermal mass to have anything like heat to melt and make them light up .If they have been running around our solar system for as long as they claim ,wouldn't they have vanished by now?

reply to post by the2ofusr1


I don't know good questions.
Maybe the truth is neither of those theories?

To the OP, thanks for the heads up.

I guess this seriously is comet season.

reply to post by muzzleflash

I guess this seriously is comet season.

me too.
But I'm worried when "their fruits" will falling down...

Are people gonbna say this is another alien starship?

OHH NOOOOOSSSSSSSS

They are going to collide and be sent spiraling off course only to be sent on a destructive collision course with the Earth and end all life as we know it! Oh the terror!

Just kidding

Will be a great photo opportunity. I am looking forward to all the awesome comet pics coming up in the next few months.

reply to post by the2ofusr1


It is possible that the electric comet theory and the present dirty snowball theory are related and can fit together. The energy can be stored by creating water or some sort of electrolytes it gathers in it's flight through space. Neither has to be wrong or right. If I knew more about this subject I could combine the two theories and check out the possibilities. I'll let someone with more knowledge of comets monkey with this though.

I do not think that the dirty snowball theory is correct as it stands. In order to have an oblong orbit something has to be causing the orbit and this is not explained as far as I have read. If you compare it to a shared electron, than something has to be sharing it and turning it around. It could be the ort cloud gravitational field itself though.

reply to post by rickymouse


I think that the gravitational aspect fails in my mind . I mean like even our little satellites spinning around our earth need to be readjusted or they end up back down here .To think that a snow ball without rockets strapped to it have been making the rounds for millennia and not being sucked into our sun or planets just seems strange .

reply to post by the2ofusr1


If you watch the size of meteorites on the spaceweather site long enough, you tend to notice that larger asteroids tend to avoid planets almost like they somehow are balancing the solar system mass. Small meteors tend to come closer to the earth but not big ones usually. It is like even the big asteroids have a purpose to balance energy, I expect comets also do this.

Mankind can mostly see what we know as true, this blinds us to reality often. I don't care how much knowledge a person holds, there is still a lot to learn. Einstein could think out of the box and see what could be real. He took what people couldn't see and showed it to them. Knowledge can blind us. Intelligence and knowledge are not the same, in some ways they can be opposites.

Opening the mind is good but you need knowledge to interpret what you see also. There needs to be synergy between the two. Protecting your beliefs is good and bad, too much change without realizing the consequences of this change is bad too.

reply to post by Lady_Tuatha


That is all we need in space, a couple of comets banging and creating a bunch of little ones to crawl around the solar system and terrorize the planets. The worst will be in two years if this happens. You've heard of the terrible twos

kangajack
Do you know when this will be visible from land? in australia

From Australia (and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere), it is not observable until 2014 February. The you can try spotting it with binoculars, rising in the East before dawn. But I don't think it will become a naked-eye object. www.aerith.net...

~~~

And yeah, people just _have_ to post about the Electric Universe every time a comet thread comes up. "Oh look, I just watched that documentary, it must be true because it makes sense to me and the mainstream model doesn't make any sense to me."

the2ofusr1
I know that the common theory of comets is that they are dirty snow balls but how could that be ?. They don't have the atmosphere or the geothermal mass to have anything like heat to melt and make them light up .If they have been running around our solar system for as long as they claim ,wouldn't they have vanished by now?

The Sun heats them up directly. Comets don't need an atmosphere or "geothermal mass" for that, just the Sun's radiation will do.

Comet usually orbit the Sun at extremely long distances, where it is very cold. They light up when they get nearer the Sun. Some comet have been expended, they now look like asteroids. Some comets have also broken up into pieces because there's not much solid rock to hold them together.

reply to post by wildespace


Any astrophysicists out there care to offer a reason why the brightness suddenly jumped?
Perihelion was back in mid-August.

www.calsky.com...

According to the (prevailing) icy dirtball theory, the brightness should be well correlated with the distance from the sun.

A significant number of comets have light curves which have brightness anomalies vs. distance from the sun. Is there a classical explanation?

the2ofusr1
...If they have been running around our solar system for as long as they claim ,wouldn't they have vanished by now?

There are extinct comets that have used up all of their volatile material and are now just rocks (asteroids). There have also been comets that have broken up and disintegrated.

If comets melt, why do they seem to last for long periods of time?

Extinct Comets - Wikipedia


Comets spend almost all of their lives out in the far reaches of the solar, orbiting nowhere near the Sun for billions of years. Every so often, one of those comets gets nudged by another comet or by some gravitational effect, and its orbit changes to bring it into the inner solar system. These comets may then orbit the sun for a few hundred or a few thousand years (a blink of an eye in astronomical timescales), coming near the sun every few decades or every few hundred years...

...However, those comets, too, will eventually lose all of their volatile materials and become extinct, like in the articles above.

the2ofusr1
reply to post by rickymouse

 

I think that the gravitational aspect fails in my mind . I mean like even our little satellites spinning around our earth need to be readjusted or they end up back down here .To think that a snow ball without rockets strapped to it have been making the rounds for millennia and not being sucked into our sun or planets just seems strange .

That's because you don't understand orbital mechanics. Comet orbits ARE unstable, sometimes they DO crash into the sun or into a planet, but they are understandable and predictable with calculations based on gravity. When Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, it did so because of gravity, not "electricty." Non-gravitational perturbations from outgassing are present but minor compared to the comet's inertia.

InverseLookingGlass
reply to post by wildespace

 

Any astrophysicists out there care to offer a reason why the brightness suddenly jumped?
Perihelion was back in mid-August.

www.calsky.com...

According to the (prevailing) icy dirtball theory, the brightness should be well correlated with the distance from the sun.

A significant number of comets have light curves which have brightness anomalies vs. distance from the sun. Is there a classical explanation?

Yes, a comet is not necessarily structurally stable. It is a mix of volatile ices and dust, and much of the volatile ice is covered by dust. Sometimes a comet can experience an outburst when internal sublimating ices exceed the tensile strength of the nucleus, causing an explosion.
www.sciencedirect.com...

reply to post by InverseLookingGlass


One of the causes for an outburst I've read about is the phase transition of ice from amorphous to cristalline, resulting in release of some heat and release of gasses through the cristalline structure. Those gasses can also accumulate beneath the surface and get released in outbursts.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Outburst of comet C/2012 X1 (LINEAR)
Monday, October 21, 2013

Cbet No. 3674, issued on 2013 October 21, reports an outburst in brightness of comet C/2012 X1 (LINEAR). The magnitude of the comet was measured by reported by H. Sato on on Oct. 20.5 to be total mag 8.5 (as measured within a circular aperture of diameter 85".2) with a brighter center about 10" across. The predicted H_10 magnitude for C/2012 X1 (LINEAR) would be around 14 now

remanzacco.blogspot.com...

1.bp.blogspot.com...

reply to post by MariaLida


Thanks for the info and pictures. Here's another picture from today: britastro.org...

I'd like to see a colour image of this comet (maybe it is also green )

We can already try to catch it in binoculars, rising in the East just before dawn:

wildespace
I'd like to see a colour image of this comet (maybe it is also green

)

I'll try to take a color image tomorrow morning if it's clear outside.